I have looked around this sub a bit to try and find something that answers this, but I can't seem to solve the conundrum I had the other day.
If the only way to give carpet a good cleaning, prior to the vacuum, was to take it outside and beat it, then why was wall-to-wall carpet (i.e. fixed and permanently installed) used? Wouldn't that have been a ridiculous suggestion for how to cover the floor?
A supplementary question: were vacuums first marketed as domestic machines (as opposed to commercial applications)? Surely they were very expensive at first.
Do you have an example or time period in mind?
Oriental rugs were so widely used in Europe that their presence in renaissance painting has its own (quite extensive) wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_carpets_in_Renaissance_painting
It's actually come full circle in that a number of styles of Oriental rugs are named after their European conventions (except in Persian of course) for instance in the "Holbein Carpet."
If anything this trend strikes me as expanding til and through the 19th century. I can't think of an example of a photograph of a 19th century middle or upperclass home that did not feature oriental rugs in every room.
Granted, interior decoration is pretty far outside my area of expertise so I may be off base.
This is of course without discussing homes/palaces in Islamdom, where, perhaps it goes without saying, the Oriental carpet dominated.